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Adobe Rants Over Linux Video Acceleration APIs

Phoronix: Adobe Rants Over Linux Video Acceleration APIs

Back in 2007, Adobe's Mike Melanson, who is responsible for much of the Linux work on the Adobe Flash Player, had blogged about the jungle of audio output methods. Linux audio has been a mess with so many choices and each project like PulseAudio having its advantages and disadvantages...

When it comes to anything to do with linux adobe has proven itself to be nothing but a inept bunch of crybabies who rather blog then actually do any developing. A year after Flash 64 came out and they still can't get it to run full screen without major performance issues never mind with the use of Linux Video Acceleration API's. For a guy that has been "been programming multimedia-type stuff on Linux since 1999", he sure has sweet **** all to show for it.

So wait, this is the company that for Flash has not been able to produce a stable 64bit release (That one version for Linux was just officially just some alpha testing version). Further their 32bit version aren't known to be anything close to a decent piece of software. Neither on Windows nor OS X nor Linux.

Not really the starting point to go and rant about others shortcomings. But well lets give them the benefit of the doubt. So what does he complain about? There are too many video acceleration apis on Linux. So going out on a limb here what he means, is that this "mess" makes it hard to implement hardware accelerated flash video playback. Well newsflash, Windows has exactly the same "problem" that the two major gpu vendors have different acceleration apis. Yet they still managed to ship out a version that at least supports one of the two. Strange how that is possible there but not on Linux. So the "too many apis" (actually really only 2 that currently exist in reality) doesn't sound so convincing.

I'n sorry that it sounds so much like a rant, but it just gets boring after a while to always read these impled "we really totally would implement all the cool features but because of other people we cant" posts. The most prominent rants and complaints about both the state of audio (and then subsequently PulseAudio) and video I have seen from developers have been from Skype and Flash. Both programms that are reknown for the horrible information policy, the lagging-behing compared to Windows software, their once-over-a-blue-moon release cycle (since a some years mostly only true for Flash) and their release that often contain few or none of the most demanded features or fixes. Yet they seem (making I am gravly mistaken?) to always be the ones screeming the loudest about how they can't do things because some area is a mess.

If they would at least offer some sort of a solution or use the complaint as the basis to start some sort of initiative with the aim to rectify what is wrong in their eyes, I would have no problems. But I really don't understand the point or the added value of such posts.

So bottomline is I have no idea why other big(ger) projects like for example mplayer has no problem supporting hardware accelerated video for those cards for which it is available, yet for a big multi-billion company the seems to be an endless black-hole of complexity.